Author: devinemiranda@hotmail.com
Publication: The Sydney Morning
Herald
Date: November 30, 2003
URL: http://smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/29/1070081589026.html
When Crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen
and Superintendent Kim McKay addressed a conference on the prevention of
violence against women earlier this year, they didn't expect a hostile
response from any of the feminists present.
After all, they had successfully
prosecuted a series of gang rape trials in which the young female victims
were degraded like animals. Bilal Skaf's historic 55-year jail sentence
last year was their doing. McKay was commander of the gang rape task force
Sayda and her nurturing of the victims was crucial. On Thursday, in Cunneen's
latest prosecution, a jury found two more men, Pakistan-born Muslims whose
names have been suppressed by the court, guilty of the violent gang rapes
of two teenage girls in Ashfield last year. Through five such trials, Cunneen
has cheerfully endured abuse and death threats from the rapists and their
families and she has been the rock and warrior for the victims.
So when Cunneen and McKay addressed
the legal conference in February they were happy to report the good news
about rape prosecutions: that the shame has now shifted to where it ought
to be - onto the perpetrator, not the victim. It was a theme that should
have been welcome but, instead, a "small but vocal group" in the audience
angrily asserted that the gang rape cases were "nothing but racist prosecutions",
that Skaf would not have received such a long sentence if he hadn't been
Lebanese.
This is how an influential part
of Sydney's legal and media circles thinks; many, to their eternal shame,
are women, for whom a politically correct stance on multiculturalism is
more precious than feminist principles or the safety of young women and
girls. It makes them uncomfortable to acknowledge the fact that young Muslim
men have been roaming around Sydney gang raping non-Muslim women, or as
the rapists like to say, "Aussie pigs" and "sluts" who ask for it. Despite
the evidence, they refuse to acknowledge it, and that this same pattern
has been occurring in other Western countries, notably France.
There have been attempts to smear
as racist, journalists or media outlets which present these facts to the
public. In March, the Anti-Discrimination Board published a carefully concocted
123-page smear pamphlet Race For The Headlines, about "moral panic" and
"anti-Arab, anti- Muslim" bigotry in the media. It was just one of many
attempts by ideologues to diminish the real and lasting suffering of the
brave young women who testified in court and ensured that at least some
rapists were locked away.
But the social problem behind the
rapes hasn't gone away. Whatever makes a subsection of immigrant families
in Sydney bring up their sons with such disregard for "Australian" or non-Muslim
females remains. In a speech recently, former detective sergeant Tim Priest,
the Cabramatta whistleblower, said he saw a pattern of denial about "Middle
Eastern crime" similar to that which he experienced about drug crime in
Cabramatta. He told of many instances of police "backing down to Middle
Eastern thugs" in confrontations in what he calls the "Muslim- dominated
areas" of south-western Sydney.
He cited a case in Auburn in 2001
when two uniformed police officers stopped a suspect car and found stolen
property. The three occupants of the car threatened to kill the officers,
and "f---" their girlfriends. When the police called for backup, so, too,
did the thugs on their mobile phones, summoning 60 associates for battle.
The response by police chiefs was to order the officers to retreat. And
then, later, when the offenders drove to the police station, intimidating
staff, damaging property and "virtually holding a suburban police station
hostage," again the police did nothing. "By avoiding all confrontations
with these thugs the police gave away the streets in many areas of south-western
Sydney," Priest said.
In another speech last week for
Opposition police spokesman Peter Debnam at Parliament House, Priest proposed
a solution to the growing mayhem: zero- tolerance policing, which transformed
New York in 1994. He spoke scathingly of academics and criminologists who
oppose the model because it conflicts with their "root cause" theory of
crime. Priest gets a lot of speaking engagements these days and his book
with anthropologist Richard Basham, To Protect And To Serve, is a bestseller.
But to the liberal establishment, he is a pariah and they take every opportunity
to belittle him.
Of course, shooting the messenger
is of no service to the vast bulk of decent, law-abiding Muslims in Sydney,
whose own leaders have been vocal in support of harsh sentences for gang
rapists.
What is really needed is some way
of combating the sorts of twisted attitudes towards women which were neatly
summed up by the father of the five brothers convicted most recently for
the Ashfield rapes.
A doctor, who gave alibi evidence
disregarded by the jury, as good as told a reporter last week the victims
asked for it. "What do they expect to happen to them? Girls from Pakistan
don't go out at night."